By soos_mite_ah,
How the Passage of Time In Adulthood is Fucking Me Up
The best way to describe it is that the days feel long, the weeks and months feel short, but the year feels long. The days feel long because my current job isn't something that interests me a whole lot and I feel like Sisyphous rolling a boulder up a hill. The weeks and months feel short because I do have actual things I need to be doing and when you're productive, time feels like it's going by fast. But also, since I don't have things like spring break, summer vacation, winter/ Christmas break, Thanksgiving break, time kind of feels like a blob because I don't have the breaks to segment parts of my year out and sometimes I feel like I don't have much that I'm counting down towards. I also catch myself feeling kind of angsty since I haven't been taking my PTO and whenever the time comes when I'm supposed to have a break, I have this visceral feeling that I'm not supposed to be working and instead I'm supposed to be hanging out and relaxing. It manifests as a sense of irritability with anti capitalist angst along with feelings of acute burn out. My yearly rhythms of 9-5 life hasn't adjusted in my head. The months and the weeks going by fast also gives me an existential crisis because it's like I blink and the month is over and next thing I know I'm questioning what I've been doing with my life and my time since it all feels like a blur. The year feels really long. I think part of it is the acute burn out due to the lack of breaks. Also, I guess things feel like a blob because when you're in school, there is a linear and segmented process of progression that you get from moving from one grade to another which isn't really a thing in the real world. I know that we're all on our different time table and some people are in seasons where a million things are going on in their lives and there are a lot of changes at once while for others, it kind of feels like a period of stagnation even though they are still growing. I would characterize it as the difference between the flowers in your garden blooming all at once in the spring, harvesting new crops in different weeks in fall, or weathering one storm after another during the winter compared to toiling away in the summer as you tend your fields where even though you know that your crops are growing below the surface and in time they will produce, you're just not seeing any of it now and the days feel long and hot. I suppose mid 2022 to 2023 was my spring. Prior to that I had a rough time in high school and college which I would characterize as the winter. From May 2022 to December 2023, I feel like I was growing a lot, having a lot of new experiences bloom, and I was enjoying the beautiful life and garden I have created for myself. I guess that makes 2024 my summer. It feels long and drawn out. Sure it's hot and unpleasant at times like winter, but it isn't as volatile as the storms during the winter so that's good. Other times, it feels soothing, like cat sleeping in a ray of sun. Nevertheless, it feels foreign to me since I'm super familiar with winter since much of my life felt like that, cold, volatile, and always in survival mode with a million thing happening at once. Sure the monotony and the heat isn't fun, but there is more stability and a sense of warmth in summer. I wouldn't say that I'm someone who is bored of ths stability because I've been subjected to chaos my whole life (I dealt with that a little in 2023 but have since normalized this sense of stability and new base line for my quality of life). I'm just not used to the long days and heat which I guess messes with my sense of time.
The best way to describe it is that the days feel long, the weeks and months feel short, but the year feels long. The days feel long because my current job isn't something that interests me a whole lot and I feel like Sisyphous rolling a boulder up a hill. The weeks and months feel short because I do have actual things I need to be doing and when you're productive, time feels like it's going by fast. But also, since I don't have things like spring break, summer vacation, winter/ Christmas break, Thanksgiving break, time kind of feels like a blob because I don't have the breaks to segment parts of my year out and sometimes I feel like I don't have much that I'm counting down towards. I also catch myself feeling kind of angsty since I haven't been taking my PTO and whenever the time comes when I'm supposed to have a break, I have this visceral feeling that I'm not supposed to be working and instead I'm supposed to be hanging out and relaxing. It manifests as a sense of irritability with anti capitalist angst along with feelings of acute burn out. My yearly rhythms of 9-5 life hasn't adjusted in my head. The months and the weeks going by fast also gives me an existential crisis because it's like I blink and the month is over and next thing I know I'm questioning what I've been doing with my life and my time since it all feels like a blur. The year feels really long. I think part of it is the acute burn out due to the lack of breaks. Also, I guess things feel like a blob because when you're in school, there is a linear and segmented process of progression that you get from moving from one grade to another which isn't really a thing in the real world. I know that we're all on our different time table and some people are in seasons where a million things are going on in their lives and there are a lot of changes at once while for others, it kind of feels like a period of stagnation even though they are still growing. I would characterize it as the difference between the flowers in your garden blooming all at once in the spring, harvesting new crops in different weeks in fall, or weathering one storm after another during the winter compared to toiling away in the summer as you tend your fields where even though you know that your crops are growing below the surface and in time they will produce, you're just not seeing any of it now and the days feel long and hot. I suppose mid 2022 to 2023 was my spring. Prior to that I had a rough time in high school and college which I would characterize as the winter. From May 2022 to December 2023, I feel like I was growing a lot, having a lot of new experiences bloom, and I was enjoying the beautiful life and garden I have created for myself. I guess that makes 2024 my summer. It feels long and drawn out. Sure it's hot and unpleasant at times like winter, but it isn't as volatile as the storms during the winter so that's good. Other times, it feels soothing, like cat sleeping in a ray of sun. Nevertheless, it feels foreign to me since I'm super familiar with winter since much of my life felt like that, cold, volatile, and always in survival mode with a million thing happening at once. Sure the monotony and the heat isn't fun, but there is more stability and a sense of warmth in summer. I wouldn't say that I'm someone who is bored of ths stability because I've been subjected to chaos my whole life (I dealt with that a little in 2023 but have since normalized this sense of stability and new base line for my quality of life). I'm just not used to the long days and heat which I guess messes with my sense of time.